Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Futures

• Author / Creator

  Beier, Jessie L.

• This study of Pedagogy at the End of the World investigates the “end of the world” scenarios that now characterize education and its reasons in Anthropocene times. Emerging through an interrogation of the apocalypse habits and anthropo-scenic views through which educational futurity is most often imagined, this study is oriented towards the creation of pedagogical concepts that work to problematize and resituate questions of educational futurity in relation to the planetary realities raised by today’s pressing extinction events. This research proceeds through a series of speculative studies of educational futurity, each of which is positioned as an experimental site for probing the limits of pedagogical un/thinkability so as to speculate, through concept creation, on alternative orientations to educational futurity. Importantly, each of these speculative studies endeavours to move beyond just analysis and critique of the epistemic constraints and conceptual affordances that have come to condition pedagogical possibility. By putting (apparent) educational givens into contact with a range of seemingly alien objects, transversal theories and strange examples, the speculative experiments that make up this work reframe and reorient both the educational problems and solutions raised by today’s end times scenario. It is from this experimentation that a weird pedagogy emerges, that is, an experimental (albeit always insufficient) pedagogical anti-model, a speculative programme for the unprogrammable that seeks to problematize, and ultimately counteractualize, potentials of and for Pedagogy at the End of the World. Through conceptual experimentation and weird encounters, this study aims to probe the limits of educational futurity, not as a way of surmounting or domesticating the unthought, but instead, as a mode of resituating educational problem-posing in relation to an unknown and unknowable future. As such, this study aims to practice experimental approaches to educational research that do not entail a rejection of the actual world and thus the real of impending ecocatastrophe, but instead opts for speculative modes and transversal styles of inquiry that might be capable of mutating and bifurcating educational future imaginaries. As such, this study asks: how might pedagogical thinking proceed when confronted with the unthinkable scenarios and unfathomable conditions raised by today’s anthropo-scenic milieu and its extinction events? What does educational inquiry entail when it confronts its own thresholds of rationality, or the limits of thought and thus a thought of limits, which, given education’s commitment to thinkability are demonstrably unpopular? How might educational problem-posing approach questions and issues that resist thought itself? And further, what are the conditions, preclusions, and exclusions that make something thinkable in the first place? By exploring the way in which contemporary educational un/thinkability is itself conditioned, this study is geared towards counter-actualizing both the narratives and methods that have come to overdetermine discussions of educational futurity so as to unsettle and singularize otherwise diminished conditions of pedagogical possibility. Through the speculative development of a weird pedagogy, this study of Pedagogy at the End of the World is not only framed as an experiment in pedagogical thought, but also aims to intervene within educational theory and research — into the process of study itself — so as to counter today's apocalypse habits and the banality of those end of the world concepts that have come to limit pedagogical possibilities, both now and into the future.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Pedagogy
  • Anthropocene
  • Education
  • Futures
  • Weird

• Graduation date

  Spring 2022

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-edcx-be38

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.